Cheestastic!

The fancy grilled cheese Sandwich Night was a pretty chaotic affair yet still a great success. We might have set an attendance record--there were 8 of us: Beth, me, Karen, Kate, my friend Laura, plus Beth's co-worker Eric and his wife KJ and son Lyndon. Only Laura and KJ were Sandwich Night newbies. Eric and Lyndon joined us for the grilled veggie sandwich last year. This time, I'm happy to report that Lyndon was old enough to eat a sandwich. Yay! Last time he just got to watch and eat baby food. Boring.
It's a good thing so many people showed up because I went a little crazy at the Trader Joe's cheese cooler. The prices are so good--how could you pass them up? I assembled a great many ingredients featured in the grilled cheese cookbook.

We had sharp cheddar, jack, mozzarella, gruyere, emmenthaler, blue, and chevre. For condiments we had dijon mustard, country pickle, fig jam, green olive mustard, walnut dijon, honey mustard, and some grainy mustard. Add to that chopped tomatoes, sliced pear, radicchio, toasted pecans, cumin seed and prosciutto. On Karen's advice, I stuck to one kind of bread, sourdough, so we could more easily compare and contrast sandwich combos.
As usual, on a night like this, it was everyone for themselves in a frenzied melee of sandwich making. I lost track of all of the mixing and matching. I can tell you that the general consensus was that goat cheese and fig jam make everything taste better.
I had to try too many combinations so I was a bit of a glutton (a Sandwich Night tradition, of course) I made 1)fig jam, mozzarella, prosciutto; 2)pear, emmenthaler, gruyere, goat cheese, cumin seeds; and 3) blue cheese, goat cheese, radicchio, pear, jack cheese, pecans. I also made a sliver of jack and green olive mustard. They were all sooo good!

I even made a salad! I'm not sure whose sandwich this is. Doesn't it look pretty?